I agree the classes often aren't that engaging, but I do think it'd be useful for everyone (or at least a lot of people) to understand the basics of giving instructions to a computer so it can do things for them. Many will end up having to do at least some simple form of it in their future lives, anyway; certainly people in the natural sciences do, and increasingly lots of other people will find themselves needing to write an Excel macro, or sort some data with a Perl script, and various other such things.

I agree current CS 101 classes aren't good at conveying that excitement though, of being able to make a computer do what you want. The linked article talks about media computation as one approach to that: instead of having people sort lists or whatever, show them that they can make simple art stuff. (I personally got hooked on computers much earlier than college in large part because of a Logo course.)